- Market Research
- Concerned with finding out whether consumers will buy a product or service, and is done by analyzing consumer reactions
- Reasons for market research
- Reduce the risks associated with new product launches
- Predict future demand changes
- Explain patterns in sales of existing products and market trends
- Assess the most favored designs, flavors, styles, promotions for a product
- Market research process:
- Identify consumer needs and tastes
- Primary and secondary research into consumer needs and competitors
- Product idea and packaging designs
- Testing product and packaging with consumer groups
- Brand positioning and advertising testing
- Pre-testing of the product image and advertisement
- Product launch and after launch period
- Monitoring of sales and consumer response
- Identify consumer needs and tastes
- Types of market research
- Primary research
- Gathering data or feedback first-hand, through
- Questionnaires (short and focused, allows open-ended questions)
- Observation (foot traffic, queuing time)
- Sampling (new product or campaigns)
- Focus groups (asking groups of people)
- Interviews
- Advantages
- Up to date
- More relevant/direct
- Confidential and unique
- Objective
- Disadvantages
- Time consuming
- Costly
- Questionable validity
- Gathering data or feedback first-hand, through
- Secondary research
- Collecting second-hand information from other sources like
- Market analyses (shows relevant market data)
- Government publications
- Academic journals
- Media articles
- Secondary research should be undertaken first because it is cheap, fast, comes with plenty of sources and offers a wide range of information
- Advantages
- Cheaper and faster
- Range of sources
- Insight to trends
- Disadvantages
- May become obsolete or out of date quickly
- May be in an inappropriate format
- Partial information
- Widely available to competitors
- Collecting second-hand information from other sources like
- Primary research
- Qualitative vs. quantitative research
- Qualitative research
- Used to get feedback to understand motivation , behavior, perception through focus groups, expert panels, in-depth interviews of credible individuals
- Qualitative explores attitudes and opinions and can be very deeply relevant even if only few are interviewed
- Can only give an indication and does not have statistical relevance.
- Relatively inexpensive but harder to analyze, more time consuming, and results are subject to bias or skill of interviewer
- Quantitative research
- Used to get statistical data from total (for figures) or representative sample (for opinion, decisions), using interviews that have closed questions or use ranking or sliding scales
- Quantitative can only ask factual answers but may not reveal reasons why
- A larger representative sample is needed and must be designed well so it ends up more costly to undertake
- Qualitative research
- Sampling
- Consumer surveys ask consumers for their opinions and preferences
- It can obtain both qualitative and quantitative information
- How many…..
- What do you look for….
- 4 points for consideration when making surveys
- What to ask?
- Questions are unbiased and unambiguous
- How to ask?
- Should the survey be self-completed or filled in by an interviewer?
- How accurate is it?
- Accurate and valid
- Who to ask?
- It is impossible to ask everybody even if it is just potential members of a target market
- A sample reflects the characteristics of the survey population
- Sample should be significant and valid to avoid sample error
- What to ask?
- Sampling methods
- Random sampling
- Random selection, based on the principle that everyone is given equal chance
- Stratified sampling
- Segmentation with number of respondents per group based on proportion to the population
- Majority of the population will compose of majority of the survey
- Cluster sampling
- Used for localized surveys (e.g. towns, region, etc.)
- Sample based on a geographic location/ concentration of the target
- Quota sampling
- A certain number or quota is set, made up of samples from each segment or random
- Snowball sampling
- Respondents are networked from a respondent’s referral
- Convenience sampling
- Respondents are chosen based on accessibility and proximity
- Random sampling